Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  But if the door to academic stardom was closing, another door was opening. The Islamic Center of Fort Collins met in a modest, one-story brick house in a residential neighborhood adjoining the Colorado State campus; it had been a church until Muslim students and professors, who had met in borrowed rooms since the 1960s, bought it for $149,000 in 1980 and finally had a permanent home for worship, study, and charitable activities. By the early 1990s, said Moin Siddiqui, a retired professor of statistics and mosque leader, Friday midday prayers, or jummah, was drawing 150 men and 30 women from diverse backgrounds. “You’d have a bunch of Pakistanis, a bunch of Malaysians, a bunch of Saudis, a bunch of Libyans. They studied hydrology, veterinary medicine, civil engineering, statistics,” he said. Without the budget to pay a full-time imam, students and professors took turns preaching the Friday sermon. It was a comfortable, low-pressure setting for an ambitious young man to try his hand at preaching, and Awlaki took advantage of it. He soon found that he had a knack for it.

  If he could boast of no deep religious training, he knew much of the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. He spoke fluent English, and he had a light touch. “He was very knowledgeable,” said Mumtaz Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant active in the mosque for two decades. “He was an excellent person—very nice, dedicated to religion.” Awlaki expressed no anti-American sentiments, said Hussain, whose son served in the National Guard. “This is our motherland now. People would not tolerate sermons of that kind,” he said.

  His choice of courses seems to reflect a growing excitement about preaching. In the summer term in 1992, he broke out of his strict engineering curriculum and took a course on public speaking, as well as introductory classes in literature and philosophy. In the spring of 1993 he signed up for “The Literature of Social Protest,” and in his final term in the summer of 1994 he took “Studies in Persuasion,” earning an A in both of those courses. As the months passed and his reputation at the mosque flourished, Anwar began to imagine an alternative to the path his father had set out for him, the lockstep sequence from an American engineering degree to a post in Yemen working on water supplies.

  Many years later, on his blog, Awlaki would say that Thomas Gradgrind, Charles Dickens’s notoriously utilitarian headmaster in Hard Times, reminded him of “some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only medicine or engineering are worthy professions for their children.” It sounded like a personal gripe. Anwar managed to pull up his grades considerably, earning all A’s and B’s his senior year. By taking courses all four summers, he managed to graduate in 1994 with a bachelor’s of science in civil engineering and an overall GPA of 2.41, a low B-minus. His father naturally wanted him to use the degree, and he took an entry-level job at an engineering consulting company in Denver. “That would be the topic at the lunch table here in Sanaa when Mom and Dad would talk about it,” Anwar’s young brother Ammar remembered. “They were happy about it, thrilled about it, when he was a trainee.” But he quit after a matter of weeks, to his father’s dismay. “I discussed the issue with him, and I tried to encourage him to continue his career as a professional engineer, because that kind of career will benefit the people of Yemen after he decides to return to Yemen,” Nasser said. But by then Anwar had managed to get a part-time job as an imam at the Denver Islamic Society, and it was obvious that his heart was in preaching, not hydrology.

  Days after receiving his degree in August 1994, Anwar flew to Abu Dhabi for a wedding—his own. The Awlaki family was modern and westernized in many respects, but in this case they opted for tradition. The match was an arranged affair in which Anwar and his bride, Gihan Mohsen Baker, the daughter of his father’s second cousin, appear to have had limited say. Like many well-off people from southern Yemen, the bride’s family had left the country after a Marxist regime seized power in the south in the late 1960s, seeking their fortune in fast-developing cities like Abu Dhabi in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Saleh bin Fareed al-Awlaki, Anwar’s wealthy uncle and a respected sheikh who had earned a fortune while living in the Gulf, helped play matchmaker. (Bin Fareed was Nasser’s first cousin and thus technically Anwar’s first cousin once removed, but Anwar called him uncle.) Anwar’s parents “asked me if I would speak to my cousin and to his daughter and her mother,” Bin Fareed recalled. “They asked, ‘Is he the right man?’ We said, ‘Yes, he’s the perfect man. Plus, he’s our blood.’ ” Anwar was twenty-three, a beanpole with an unruly beard at six-foot-one and 135 pounds; Gihan was nineteen. They settled in Denver, and their first child, a boy they named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, was born there on an August afternoon a year later.

  By most accounts, Awlaki’s preaching in the early years was unobjectionable even to those American Muslims who were especially wary of hints of radicalism, which could attract unwanted attention from the authorities or alienate non-Muslims. There were mentions of the plight of the Palestinians and criticism of sanctions on Iraq for depriving ordinary Iraqis of medicine and food, an issue to which Awlaki would often return in later years. The tenor of Awlaki’s message was unambiguously conservative in terms of social values. Like many an evangelical Christian pastor, Awlaki preached against vice and sin, lauded marriage and family values, and parsed the scripture, winning fans across a range of generations. As an American citizen in his mid-twenties, equally at home in Arabic and American-accented English, Awlaki was a rarity. Most imams at American mosques were older immigrants who spoke English with a heavy accent or not at all and had little understanding of American youth culture. Awlaki could meet young Muslims on their own turf and sympathize with their awkward position between two cultures, one at home, the other at school. But he impressed Arab immigrant parents and grandparents, too, as a bright young man who could discuss spiritual matters or practical problems in Arabic. “He had a beautiful tongue,” said one of the pillars of the Denver mosque, a Palestinian American in his sixties. “He had a nice voice. He had earned the knowledge he needed.”

  But the same elder recalled a painful dispute at the end of Awlaki’s time at the mosque, known as Al Noor, or “the light.” A Saudi student at the University of Denver told the older man that he had decided, with Awlaki’s encouragement, to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad against the Russians. The elder thought the Saudi’s plan was ill-advised and confronted Awlaki after Friday prayers. He told Awlaki that the young man should not go on jihad without the permission of his parents, citing the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Their argument grew louder, with a small group of worshippers pausing to watch. “My way was dawah,” or inviting people to accept Islam and its teachings, he said. “His way was jihadi.” As their dispute escalated, the elder said, “I told him, ‘Don’t talk to my people about jihad.’ He left two weeks later.”

  Years later, said the elder, who was reluctant to be quoted by name about controversial topics, he felt vindicated when the 9/11 attacks showed what loose talk of jihad could lead to. “This jihad situation started long ago. It wasn’t dealt with then, and it’s grown and grown,” he said. “Some of these leaders are brainwashing the young people.” He said he counseled young Muslims studying in the United States to stay out of politics: “I tell them, ‘You’re here to get your education and go back and serve your people. That’s your jihad.’ ”

  Indeed, the concept of jihad, literally “struggle” in Arabic, is as flexible and disputed as “freedom” in American political discourse. Jihad can be the struggle within oneself to do the right thing, the struggle to raise your children as honest and caring people, or the nonviolent struggle against injustice in the world. But its most common meaning in everyday parlance is, of course, that of an armed struggle for Islam. In official American government pronouncements, as well as American public sympathies, the Chechen jihad against the often-brutal Russian military sometimes got implicit or open sympathy. In the months before Awlaki’s dispute with the Al Noor elder, in 1996, the State Department regularly condemned Russian military atrocities in Chechnya and
the relentless bombing of Grozny, capital of the autonomous republic in Russia’s mountainous south. Given Awlaki’s own adventure visiting Afghanistan, it is easy to imagine him offering religious sanction to a Saudi student a few years younger to follow his dream. The Saudi student at the Denver mosque did follow Awlaki’s advice, went to join the fight—and died in Chechnya in 1999, the elder said.

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  Awlaki’s reputation for preaching in Denver got him an invitation to become the head imam at another mosque, Al Rribat al-Islami, in San Diego, a city whose sunny climate and seaside setting must have been hard to resist. Al Rribat means “retreat” or “fortress,” and the mosque had been founded by Saudi and other Gulf students who felt that the city’s main mosque, the Islamic Center of San Diego, known as Abu Bakr, was too liberal. Al Rribat occupied a handsome stucco building with blue-green tile under a towering palm tree, and Anwar and Gihan and their growing family—Abdulrahman now had a younger sister, Mariam—moved into a modest house next door. Now, at the early age of twenty-five, he was in charge of his own mosque. Again, his reviews were excellent, and he seemed to take to the idyllic Southern California lifestyle.

  “He lit up when he was with the youth,” said Jamal Ali, forty, an airport driver. He played soccer with younger children and took teenagers paintballing—a common outing for church youth groups, too, without the association with training for jihad that it later took on from a terrorism prosecution in Virginia. The young imam found himself counseling people far older than he was, and he was still finding his way, Ali said. “I saw him evolving in trying to understand where he fit into Islam,” he said. Awlaki read lots of books on leadership; he later let his younger brother, Ammar, help himself, and Ammar found a well-thumbed copy of Stephen R. Covey’s 1989 mega-bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, in his collection.

  Lincoln W. Higgie III, an art dealer in his late fifties who lived across quiet Saranac Street, found Awlaki to be an engaging and thoughtful neighbor who apologized about the parking problems that came with the flood of Friday worshippers. On Thursdays, Higgie remembered, Awlaki liked to go fishing for albacore, and sometimes he would bring over a sample of the catch, deliciously prepared by his wife. The Awlakis’ toddler son and daughter would play on Higgie’s floor, chasing his pet macaw, while the men compared notes on their travels. “I remember he was very partial to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul,” Higgie said. He detected no hint of hostility toward or discomfort with non-Muslims like himself.

  Awlaki’s family also stayed in close touch. His father spent six months in San Diego in 1997, enjoying time with his grandchildren. And when a scheme to invest in gold and minerals caught his son’s eye—not the first or last time Anwar would be attracted by a supposedly lucrative investment—Nasser loaned him some $20,000. (He “lost everything,” Nasser later recalled with a rueful laugh.)

  Anwar invited his brother, Ammar, now seventeen, to spend the summer of 1998 with him in California, and the teenager had a memorable time. On the sidewalk outside the mosque after Friday prayers, he sold jars of famed Yemeni honey for a total of $700, a neat profit of $600 over what he had paid at home. Alongside the honey, he sold cassettes of his brother’s lectures on the lives of the prophets of Islam. The bigger San Diego mosque, Abu Bakr, had offered Anwar a job, which he turned down, Ammar said. But the discussions led to a regular series of lectures by Anwar at Abu Bakr, and those talks became the basis of the lectures that a few years later, recorded professionally, would make Anwar famous among English-speaking Muslims.

  “He was very popular, charismatic,” Ammar recalled, “hanging out with the younger guys more than older guys. That was the start of the Internet—e-mail, AOL, all that stuff. He had a computer in his office at the mosque, and that’s where he spent most of the time. The rest of the time we’d go mountain climbing, camping. We had some fun camping—the two of us and guys from the mosque.” Ammar said he grew sick of eating fish (“It was fish all the time—salad with fish, rice with fish”), but he had fond memories of accompanying his brother on early-morning trips on a big fishing boat with about fifty people aboard, catching yellowfin tuna and barracuda. They would clean their catch in the kitchen, and Anwar’s wife would complain about the mess, Ammar said.

  Anwar, clearly buoyed by his own success, encouraged his younger brother to resist family pressure in his choice of a career. “He would tell me, you know, ‘Be a lawyer, be an artist, be an author—don’t be an engineer or a doctor, because you can find an engineer or doctor to do that for you.’ He always insisted that, ‘Ammar, don’t choose what Dad and Mom choose for you. Choose what you think you can find yourself in.’ ”

  To most everyone he knew, Awlaki’s life seemed to be going remarkably well. But there were darker currents in both Anwar’s personal life and his professional life during his San Diego years. Twice, in 1996 and 1997, the young husband and father was arrested for soliciting undercover police officers posing as prostitutes on a notorious strip not far from the mosque, and once he was charged for loitering near a school. In 1999, alarmed by his contacts with suspected militants, the FBI opened an investigation, closing the inquiry with no charges the following year. Those episodes would remain unknown even to some close acquaintances at the time. Years later, after 9/11, those earlier arrests and suspicious contacts would get new scrutiny, as investigators tried to understand whether Awlaki might have had a secret life far beyond his dalliances with streetwalkers.

  For now, however, his growing renown drew speaking invitations from mosques around the country. In February 2000, with a few associates, Awlaki incorporated a company in Nevada to sell his sermons and lectures on CD, calling the company Al Fahm Inc., for the Arabic word for “intellect” or “insight.” His father, who had visited him in San Diego and seen his success at the mosque and beyond, had given up on trying to steer him back to engineering. But Nasser al-Awlaki still worried about Anwar’s career choice—and especially about what it would mean if he chose to return to Yemen. “I told him, If you come back to Yemen, you’ll be just another imam, and there are thousands of imams in Yemen,” Dr. Awlaki recalled. “The best thing for you, my son, is really to have another career.” Nasser al-Awlaki used his connections with Sanaa University to get Anwar a scholarship to do a master’s degree in educational leadership at San Diego State. Then he persuaded him to go on to complete a PhD and helped arrange for the government to support that, too. By his father’s account, Anwar decided to leave his job at the San Diego mosque to begin a doctoral program elsewhere. He was accepted by the University of California at Santa Barbara, but he heard that the program at George Washington University in the nation’s capital was better. The fees were far beyond what his government scholarship would pay, so George Washington agreed to waive all fees if he would take on a part-time role as the university’s Muslim chaplain, giving occasional religious classes and counseling students. Even with his tuition covered, however, his $800-a-month scholarship from the Yemeni government was not enough to support his family, so he would have to find a job.

  Then he got a recruiting call from a far bigger mosque that served the thriving, diverse Muslim community right outside the nation’s capital. Dar Al-Hijrah—the name means “land of migration,” aptly capturing the jumble of nationalities and languages represented at Friday prayers—was a powerhouse.

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  Later the mosque would have to fend off hyperventilating accusations of guilt by association with terrorists, notably Awlaki himself, and would be given a scurrilous label in the right-wing media, “the 9/11 mosque.” Given that subsequent history, the motive of Dar Al-Hijrah leaders when they offered Awlaki a job as imam at the end of 2000 was more than a little ironic: they hired him specifically because they were worried about the dangers of radicalization. They feared that Dar Al-Hijrah, in suburban Falls Church, Virginia, was losing young people to a nearby, more overtly militant storefront mosque, one whose underground feel was underscored by its name: Dar al
Arqam, for the owner of the safe house in Mecca where the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers met in secret. “The mosque’s objective in hiring Anwar was, they had had a series of imams who did not speak English and were not engaged with the youth,” said Johari Abdul Malik, a longtime Muslim chaplain at Howard University who became director of outreach for Dar Al-Hijrah in 2002. At Dar al Arqam, a charismatic bioscientist named Ali al-Timimi was drawing young people with a hard line: that voting was haram—forbidden by Islamic law—because it elevated man’s law over God’s law, and that serving in the American military was outlawed because US forces might fight against Muslims. Dar Al-Hijrah, though its leaders might express strong anti-Israel views and oppose social equality for women, took a far more accommodating stance toward American life. For some young people with an assertive approach to their faith, the mosque’s leaders were far too accommodating.

  “They weren’t offering the edginess that young cats need,” said Abdul Malik, an African American convert to Islam who spent years counseling college students. “Young cats wanted someone to say, ‘I’m not joining the military—they’re killing Muslims. What do they say at Dar Al-Hijrah about that? If you go to Dar al Arqam they’re laying it out, brother!’ ”